Bittensor co-founders accuse Covenant AI founder of betraying the community and plan to introduce a staking lock-up mechanism

Deep Tide TechFlow News, April 12, according to Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves’ post on the X platform, he publicly spoke out about the Covenant AI incident, stating that the events of the past few days have left him “deeply shaken.” He accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of deliberately causing maximum harm to himself and the protocol, resulting in losses for all TAO holders, especially users who believed in its subnet vision and bought its tokens. “He betrayed everyone.” Steeves also apologized to users who suffered losses due to this incident.

In the post, Steeves stated that he does not plan to respond further to Samuel Dare’s accusations on the X platform and said he is “most likely experiencing a mental breakdown because he’s flying too close to the sun.”

Regarding countermeasures, Steeves proposed advancing a “Locked Stake” mechanism, introducing a “time + staking” commitment dimension at the protocol level, allowing subnet owners to clearly express their confidence in the long-term value of their projects, thereby increasing transparency and strengthening investor protection. He pointed out that this plan was originally one of the last designs before Samuel Dare left the Opentensor Foundation, and he expressed that “the real regret is that we didn’t implement it earlier.”

Regarding the follow-up on subnets 3, 39, and 81, Steeves said that the miner community and former Covenant team members are organizing to take over related work, the code has been open-sourced, and the subnet functions and vision will not change. He plans to further discuss the above plan in a public call on Bittensor Discord next Thursday. Steeves also stated that Bittensor is currently the most decentralized AI protocol and concluded with “Next time, we will train a trillion-parameter model.”